NFL Pro 2013

Every fall, football fanatics across the country have a nice bounce in their step in anticipation of the season. Whether you are a fan of a frontrunner like the Packers or a suffering Raiders fan, everyone has an optimism that this season is going to be special. On iOS, we have had a few years of football from EA Sports and Gameloft. The games have been okay, but we are still waiting for that stellar effort that gets it right. NFL Pro 2013 has arrived and unlike prior editions, this year’s model is free to play. Does it deliver the top notch experience we have been waiting for? We hit the gridiron to find out.

NFL Pro 2013 can be a frustrating effort during gameplay. From a controls perspective, it attempts to cram in all the functions and controls you would typically see in a proper Madden game on consoles. It uses a variety of onscreen buttons and gyroscopic controls that, on paper, would seem to cover everything. The reality is that using these controls when live bullets are flying is incredibly impractical. Juking your ball carrier by tilting your iOS device is a great way of losing some visibility during gameplay. It is also easy to accidentally hit the trucking button to run over defenders when you mean to hit the speed burst due to the placement of the virtual buttons.

Blue forty-two, hut hut.

First person passing is new to Gameloft’s football franchise, and we haven’t seen anyone attempt this since 2K tried it in the NFL2K series a generation ago. Whenever you drop back to pass, you have a view of the field from the quarterback’s perspective to find an open receiver. Again, in theory this sounds awesome, but in practice it doesn’t quite work. Part of playing quarterback is making reads on the defense and finding your open receiver. In NFL Pro 2013, the passing angle is very low to the ground, making it difficult to actually see who is open. To make it easier to pass, each receiver has a color coded icon that changes from red to green when someone is open. It’s stupid easy to score on the brain-dead computer artificial intelligence. Their defense usually has no pass rush and you have all day to sit in the pocket and wait for someone to get open. It’s unrealistic and boring.

Playing defense is just as flawed, with the offense being nearly unstoppable. Sluggish controls and weird animations make some funny things happen. When you do finally manage to get your player into position to make a play, the offense somehow magically finds a way to catch the ball. This makes blitzing the only real option for getting pressure on the offense to cause a turnover or punt; forget about playing coverage based defense.

Put a little mustard on it.

As free-to-play gains steam on iOS, it is not surprising to see the model get extended to sports. In NFL Pro 2013, though, it’s a big fat fail. We don’t even know where to begin, but virtually everything is locked behind a paywall and requires virtual currency to unlock. Sure, you can earn credits from simply playing the game, but there are several layers of gameplay locked behind paywalls. Everything from football stadiums, play books, and player edits are not available unless you want to pay for them. Let’s say you are in the middle of a game and you want to call a deep pass play for the winning score. You better make sure you buy that particular set of plays, or you’re out of luck. We would much rather pay for game once and have all the features and functions available immediately. You also have to tolerate a ridiculous number of ads for other Gameloft titles. There is no way to sugarcoat it: NFL Pro 2013 is a nickel and diming machine.

It is a shame such bad strategic choices ultimately kill the appeal of NFL Pro 2013. The game looks good enough and has the bones of a solid game. On top of what we detailed earlier, there is no online multiplayer or real players either. If you have a shiny new iPhone 5, be prepared to play with black borders, because that extra half inch is not supported. If you are dying to play football, you can give this a shot, but NFL Pro 2013 is not a game we would recommend at all.

Connect with us

Latest Recommended Games

The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

Advertisement

Apple, the Apple logo, Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Other terms may be trademarks of their respective companies.